Insurance Competition Under Asymmetric Categorization : Evidence from the Washington Automobile Insurance Market

To strategically segment a market a firm must categorize consumers more finely than its competitors and set its prices within those categories to simultaneously create adverse selection problems for its competitors and exploit those problems to increase its profits and market share. Recent research finds evidence of strategic segmentation but the extent to which segmentation is utilized in insurance markets is unclear. The evidence of segmentation is limited to rapidly developing and relatively high risk markets. This paper contributes to the literature on in three important respects. First, no evidence is found for the use of strategic segmentation in the Washington standard auto insurance market. Second, the predictions regarding the relationship between the distribution of consumers in terms of their cost of insuring and the profitability of segmentation are found to be consistent with data. Together these results imply that segmentation only conveys an advantage in markets with relatively high expected risk heterogeneity within existing categories. Finally, the results provide a robustness check for the empirical strategy used to identified strategic segmentation in the Washington non-standard auto insurance market